Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (15 page)

MALANGA:
“There was always a problem between Lou and
John ultimately when it came to who was the leader of the group.”

MORRISSEY:
“Well, you know, I don’t think so. I think John idolized Lou. And he thought anything Lou said was wonderful and Lou knew. And when Lou was against Nico, John was a thousand times against Nico 100 per cent. In the end Andy’s connection with The Velvet Underground, like anything that happens to Andy, just made a gold-mine of good fortune for him and he became identified with rock’n’roll and the young generation. So, in a way, it was the best thing that ever happened to Andy to connect with a group that became that well known. So, in a way, it was a very good thing that happened to him. But I did it hoping to make some money. Do you remember we went to a place in Detroit with Dick Clark and they gave us a cheque, it was a two-party cheque, and I never could collect the two-thousand five-hundred dollars, because it had only one signature on it? Oh, it was all so awful, that life. I always felt sorry for rock’n’rollers afterwards, what a horrible life they lead running around to these horrible things. But we worked with The Velvets from the beginning for pure commercial reasons.”

It is one of the paradoxes of Warhol’s career that he is constantly criticized for being too much of a businessman to be an artist, and that his major motivation is money. After doing great innovative work in a field, he often immediately left it for others to reap the sometimes great financial benefits. This was particularly true in his film work (i.e.,
My Hustler
in terms of its influence on John Schlesinger’s very successful
Midnight Cowboy)
. Warhol’s films deserve the highest praise for doing the ultimate in art – making people see life differently, as it really is. His work during 1966 in rock, where he literally created the light show and developed the whole multimedia dimension that was gobbled up by every conceivable rock entrepreneur, is still hardly credited in the plethora of rock histories that have been published.

The Velvets had made a great record, and were at the vortex of the most creative scene in New York when it came out, but they were not feeling as great as we might imagine. MGM was trying to do something new with its Verve label by bringing out some freaky records, but everybody got uptight when it was noticed that The Mothers of Invention’s
Freak Out
album was getting all the publicity. MGM either didn’t understand The Velvets, or were censoring their subject matter and sound. It’s also true, however, that Zappa had a rock’n’roll manager Herb Cohen, who was experienced at working with music industry executives, whereas Warhol and Morrissey were not. The group sorely needed some business muscle in the music industry which is where they were getting ignored. While The EPI had a good electrician who knew how to work a fuse-box, a good roadie, good projectionists, good dancers, good photographers, great musicians and fabulous art directors, The Velvet Underground didn’t have anyone who really just wanted to be a good business person for them, which is probably the major factor in the faltering momentum of The EPI Velvet Underground that became apparent. But then again, even if they had been able to get the gritty business together, they’d really done what they set out to do.

In the face of this total lack of support from their record label The EPI once again joined forces and played Rhode Island School of Design. On April 11 they returned to the scene of their first real triumph, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where they played for the Architecture School. At a party after the show a young man called Jim Osterburg, aka Iggy Pop, caught his first glimpse of The Velvets, Andy and Nico who was playing with them again.

In April, the son of the Dom’s Polish owner approached Andy with an idea for a new club in New York. Originally a Czechoslovakian health and social club in the East 70s, it was called the Gymnasium. The idea was to leave all the gym equipment for the guests to play on. The EPI played there
and tried to resuscitate the atmosphere they had created the previous April at the Dom, but they couldn’t get an exclusive lease on the place and the location was poor.

CHRIS STEIN:
“Everything picked up when
Sgt Pepper
came out in
1967.
I used to play out in Brooklyn with my friends’ bands. It was just an ongoing thing, it wasn’t career oriented, it was just communication. Everybody was always on the periphery of the art scene and I had this friend who was a cute little boy with superlong blond hair who was a gofer for Andy at the Factory. One night he said, ‘Listen, I can get you guys a gig opening for The Velvet Underground at the Gymnasium.’ I had never seen The Velvet Underground but we had the Banana album and everybody knew who they were, so we said, ‘Oh fantastic!’ The night of the gig we got on the subway with our instruments and we were totally hippied out. We had balloons and a couple of girlfriends and everybody was dressed in beads and feathers. It was like a be-in on the subway floating towards Manhattan. We were ready to go, although we had previously only played in the living room or the basement.

“It was pretty late at night by the time we got out of the subway in Manhattan and headed toward the Gymnasium. Walking down the block with our guitars we actually saw some people coming down the street and they said, ‘Oh, are you guys the band, because we’ve been waiting there all night and we couldn’t take it anymore, we left because they never showed up.’ So we said, ‘Yeah, we’re the band.’ We went inside and there was hardly anyone there. Somebody said Andy was supposed to be there, but he was off in the shadows with his entourage, we never saw him. We hung around for a little while and they played records, then we headed up for the stage. It was a big echoey place, we had absolutely no conception of playing a place like this whatsoever, but Maureen Tucker said we could use their equipment. So we plugged into their amps and the amps were all cranked up superloud. All Maureen had was a bass drum and
a snare drum, but they were both turned on their side so the drummer was completely thrown off, but she said, ‘Well, it’s okay, you can put them right side up,’ and somehow they produced a bass pedal from somewhere. Then we tried to play, but we were totally floored because we couldn’t play in this huge resounding echo. It was a giant gymnasium with basketball hoops and everything was echoing so we couldn’t really handle that, but we hacked our way through our little blues songs and people sort of watched us at first and then some of them tried to dance. The only song I remember doing was ‘You Can’t Judge A Book By Its Cover’. We must have done a few more, but I remember sitting down after a while because the whole thing had gotten me pretty discouraged. Then somebody came over and said, ‘Oh Andy likes you, he thinks you’re great.’ We must have played five or six songs then we just gave up. By that time the rest of The Velvets had arrived. After a while they started to play and they were like awesomely powerful. I had never expected to experience anything like that before. They just completely filled up the whole room with their sound. They were really into this huge fucking volume, and it was completely awesome. I was really disappointed that they didn’t have Nico, because we thought she was the lead singer, but I distinctly remember the violin and their doing ‘Venus In Furs’ because a couple of people in dark outfits got up and started doing a slow dance with a chain in between them. They did practically all the stuff from the Banana album. There were maybe thirty people there. It was very late, but it was a memorable experience. It was the dominant confident power of the whole thing that stayed with me.”

BOCKRIS:
“Is it true that John Cale’s father is deaf and his mother is mute?”

BETSEY JOHNSON:
“No! His father’s got a coal-miner’s sense of humour. They don’t talk in Wales, they sing. He was very, very funny and their whole thing was watching Tom and Jerry. They had no cars on the street in
Cumminford. We were there the Christmas of ’67. We lived together a year before we got married.”

BOCKRIS:
“When did you first become aware of The Velvet Underground?”

JOHNSON:
“When they asked me to do clothes. That must have been the linkage. That’s when I fell in love with John. Lou and I don’t and never did sync. It’s in the stars, because underneath John is an old-fashioned romantic who wants to come home and have the wife with apron, kiss and hello, scratch his back and get his slippers and pipe. After going to Wales I really understood what he was all about. The first real time I talked with The Velvets was on a work-collaboration. I figured that’s when we really had something to say to each other. Lou wanted grey suede. For Sterling and Maureen I did dark green and maroony velvets with all the little nail-head studs. But John wanted his hands to be on fire while he played. And he wanted to wear a mask. I think he wore masks a couple of times. I never did masks for him but I think he had them in black. I remember them a lot in Philadelphia and Boston. I thought that they were great. I mean, they were our band. I fell in love with John and we started living together when we were both in the Hotel Chelsea. Janis Joplin was there. Later I got a loft on La Guardia Place, and we were there for a while, and then we just decided to get married. The awful thing was
The Ladies’ Home Journal
, the Magazine of Togetherness, was very much interested in us freaks then. I must have established some kind of something for myself at Paraphernalia, the press was really great.
Ladies’ Home Journal
found out we were getting married and was going to pay for this huge bash. They just wanted to be there and photograph the freaky little rock’n’roll scene wedding ceremony and party even though we did it at City Hall. It was all set up and we had all the wedding invitations printed and they were all set to go to the mailbox and the day that they were supposed to go in the mail John was turning bright yellow! He went to the hospital and I said, ‘Well, dear, when shall I mail these out?
I’ll wait for you to get your blood test.’ He didn’t even leave the hospital. He went straight into quarantine with hepatitis and a non-existent liver. He was in the hospital for four months. Then the doctors took a sample and he walked out with a perfect liver. They could not believe it! They were afraid he was going to kick over, he was so saffron.
Ladies’ Home Journal
was so outraged that they wanted me to go on with the whole wedding, go to City Hall, no John and then they said, ‘Well later we’ll take a picture of John and strip him in!’ Lou was not very happy John was getting married period, to me period. Because it was like two guys wanting to be stars. They were the perfect match, but they were the perfect mismatch in that their true-deep-down directional head for music was very different and I think John really respected Lou’s more commercial kind of ability. That was when the group was together because Lou was just … it was like the girl breaking up the group …”

BOCKRIS:
“What sort of financial state were they in at this point?”

JOHNSON:
“Well … I don’t remember chipping in. I loved John. I loved his work. I loved the group’s craziness. I had a place. I was making money. He didn’t have to worry about rent or food.”

BOCKRIS:
“It’s hard to know from this perspective to what extent The Velvets recognized their talent and lived the lifestyle to the full.”

JOHNSON:
“They never did. In the Sixties none of us did.”

BOCKRIS:
“It was always very uncertain?”

JOHNSON:
“The Velvets were totally insecure all the time I think. I worried that John was going to be alive every day, even though I didn’t want to know at all about what he was doing to himself. It was an on-the-edge kind of time every day. That was the great side of it.”

BOCKRIS:
“Was this vulnerability like, in a sense, a very strong paranoia or just sheer fragility of the creative being on the edge the whole time?”

JOHNSON:
“All of it. I never took a drug in the ’60s. I wanted to smoke grass but John could never smoke grass, so I never got introduced.”

BOCKRIS:
“Why not?”

JOHNSON:
“He’d get paranoid craziness. So I didn’t even go near. I thought he was real special because of that, that craziness to me was incredibly interesting. But especially after I moved away, too. He was really the kind that would be afraid to go out into the street – from paranoia or whatever makes you that way. I don’t think any of us were too secure outside of our little realm. I always felt very out of it because I was in a commercial business with a price-tag. I felt, they’re the creative people, I’m the commercial kind of thing. I had that kind of schedule to keep to.”

BOCKRIS:
“Did you get the sense that The Velvet Underground was John’s whole life?”

JOHNSON:
“Yeah! But then I remember Terry Riley and his peanut butter ‘Eat Me Out!’, being around a lot, and La Monte Young. Nico under the sink! Nico used to come over and live under my big stainless steel sink. And the whole loft was just music. We had a little bed in the corner.”

BOCKRIS:
“Did you see John’s personality breaking in two, in the sense that on the one hand he was a very creative personality balancing on the edge, on the other hand he had a very old-fashioned romantic sensibility?”

JOHNSON:
“Yeah … and on the other hand he always wanted that hit-45 or hit single. He’s the same way now.”

FINKELSTEIN:
“I could never figure out whether John Cale wanted to be Elvis Presley, the Frankenstein monster, or young Chopin.”

CALE:
“We were trying to do a Phil Spector thing with as few instruments as possible. On some tracks it worked. ‘Venus In Furs’ is the best, and ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ and
‘Sunday Morning’. The band never again had as good a producer as Tom Wilson. He did those songs, plus ‘Heroin’ and ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’. They were done in LA at Cameo-Parkway. Andy Warhol (credited prominently as producer) didn’t do anything; the rest were done by a businessman who came up with $1500 for us to go into a broken-down studio and record the thing. I wasn’t writing songs until Lou and I did ‘Little Sister’ for Nico’s
Chelsea Girls
LP. Whenever Lou and I worked together, I’d play piano and he would flip whatever version he had around it. I didn’t contribute lyrics to any of his songs; he contributed to some of mine. We collaborated slightly on ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ and, later, ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’. Most of it would be written, but a small part would be unresolved and Lou would resolve it.”